There is a good column today at Novakio, an alternative news webzine, by Frosty Wooldridge that makes the point that we can’t save the world by bringing the world to America. Taking aim at news coverage at the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, Wooldridge begins:
The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News frequently publish stories on legal and illegal migrants struggling to make a new home in America. Those pieces, filled with sob stories enough to empty a box of Kleenex at a ‘chick flick’, provide the fodder for a never ending flood of immigrants seeking a better life.
But they never talk about the other side of the coin as those immigrants impact American citizens. The DP and RMN never talk about jobs taken from American citizens by legal and illegal immigrants. They fail to talk about the 28 million Americans living on food stamps or 14 million Americans unemployed because immigrants take millions of jobs annually. They fail to tell readers that taxpayers pay for the plane flights, resettlement costs, food, medical, education and housing for immigrants.
He goes on to point out that immigrants displace American workers at the lower end of the job scale. He’s right, where are the sob stories for those who lose their jobs.
Whether they come from Somalia, Burma or Ethiopia, they find themselves ripped out of their cultures, languages and family connections. They arrive in the USA without any skills that benefit America. They cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in resettlement costs. They become cab drivers, grocery baggers and other jobs that require no skills other than showing up. At the same time, they take jobs away from American teens, working poor and other Americans—who now stand in unemployment lines, soup kitchens and living on welfare.
And, I’ve always thought this was amazing. The ‘save the earth’ reporters never never seem to link urban sprawl and the loss of farmland and open space to the millions of immigrants arriving in the US every year.
Beyond the sob stories and the human misery, those reporters never talk about the horrific impact of adding 2.4 million immigrants to the USA annually. Each one causes a 12.6 ‘ecological footprint’ whereby 12.6 acres of land must be destroyed to support that person.
From time to time, we remind readers to watch the Numbers USA link at the top of our home page. This is a good time to see it again.